If Abrams thinks he knows his audience he is mistaken

[Kegg]

Homeric may not be the right word. Homer was about the only guy who didn't protray Achilles and Patroclus in an umabiguously gay light. Greek homosexuality is a complicated issue, anyway, and yes, was mostly predicated on older men with younger men. It does amuse me some unintentional results we've gotten, though - the desire to not read Greek texts as having any gay origins led people to believe that Alcibiades desperate attempt to bed Socrates wasn't really about a roll in the sheets at all, and so the term 'platonic love' was coined.

I disgress, eh?

Also on 300: Er, it's not about history and it's entirely about the political, sexual and racial prejudices of the author. Or so I'm guessing because I cannot make sense of it otherwise. Anyway, 300 has a worldview clearly contrary to the liberalism of Star Trek, so it's not an example the Trek franchise should seek to emulate. Keep Frank Miller at arms length at all times, folks.

I think that Western civilization is very likely to be the only real oasis for homosexual freedom on Earth.

Quite, but this is in spite of Christian influence rather than because of it. We're also at the first point in our history that the idea of gay marriage has been formulated, which I think reflects how the idea of marriage has evolved. 'Marriage for legal offspring', I believe Demosthenes once tritely put it. Now that pumping out babies isn't necessarily the main selling point of marriage, non-heterosexual marriages are beginning to sort of make sense.

 

[Myasishchev]

True, I should've said "Bronze Age," probably.

But I would say "unambiguously bisexual," too, inasmuch as Achilles was, seriously, a serial rapist. The chick on Skyros, Bryseis, etc--and the son of a rapist born from a violation of a divinity, and the father of rapist and baby-killer Pyrrhus. Not that the Peleids were any particular deviation--Achilles has nothing on the antagonist of the Iliad, Agamemnon, whose "marriage" to Clytemnestra is blood-curdling. Then again, it's about par for the course for an Atreid.

The message from the Greek heroes sometimes seems to be that homosexuality is the only method through which any sort of equal, sharing sexual relationship can be viably accomplished at all, Odysseus/Penelope maybe notwithstanding, and probably very much withstanding, given that Odysseus is still a kind of a prick.

 

[Kegg]

The message from the Greek heroes sometimes seems to be that homosexuality is the only method through which any sort of equal, sharing sexual relationship can be viably accomplished at all, Odysseus/Penelope maybe notwithstanding.

Totally. I forget where it was said in Plato, but I remember reading somewhere where two characters agreed that an idiot (or rather man with a poor sense of aesthetics and forms and what have you) is someone who considers man/woman love any way comparable to man/boy.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Y'know... Rejoined was an interesting episode in that Jadzia's past self (male) had a relationship with the other woman's past self (female). It just happened that in this lifetime... They were two attractive women.

 

[Captain Robert April]

^ The beauty of "Rejoined" is that it boiled away a lot of the superfluous baggage and left the core of the matter: What is it you actually fall in love with, the heart, soul, and mind, or the genitalia? If it's the former, then does the latter really matter all that much?

 

[Sci]

^ The beauty of "Rejoined" is that it boiled away a lot of the superfluous baggage and left the core of the matter: What is it you actually fall in love with, the heart, soul, and mind, or the genitalia?

For my money, most people fall in love with the unique combination of both.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The point is to get the message across to the uninitiated, and sneak in a lesson when you're not expecting it. Preaching to the choir doesn't really accomplish much.